Think Beyond the Click

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Using Personalization to Amplify Media and Email Marketing Campaigns

Marketing teams invest heavily in email deployments and digital media buys. From building creative to choosing targeting parameters and setting up A/B tests for subject lines and ad copy, the bulk of this investment is spent with one goal in mind: drive clicks. With a hyperfocus on CTR as the magic metric of success, investment often—unfortunately—doesn’t support ongoing, personalized brand experiences after an initial touchpoint.

Orchestrate a Journey

As marketers, our goal is to orchestrate a journey via brand touchpoints. When someone clicks an ad or a link within an email, it’s only the first step of the journey. We always need to think about the “next best step” to build upon what someone already knows and/or loves about our brand and leverage that to drive some sort of conversion.

To personalize brand experiences with “bread crumbs” to guide visitors, we must have data that tells us who the customer is, where they are coming from and what they are interested in doing or seeing. Email campaigns and digital ads can help us gather that data.

Segment Based on Action

Once fans click on an ad or piece of email content, marketers can start to learn valuable information about their preferences and intent, and segment accordingly. For example, someone who clicks on an article linked within an email about family activities in your destination could be segmented into a group of “Family Travelers”. That audience of visitors would be interested in different imagery and content on your website—and ultimately a different end goal (ex. book a family ski excursion)—than someone who clicked a banner ad about group experiences or wedding venues in the area.

We’re talking about more than just guiding these visitors to a campaign landing page. The goal is to personalize the experience elsewhere on your website so their preferences are reflected and acknowledged beyond the first page of their brand experience. This personalization should extend to future website visits as well—not just the single visit that resulted from the initial ad click.

Data, Data, Data

Campaign click data is only the first step. Look to combine this information with previously known customer data points like zip code, email subscription status, etc. to build a dynamic profile for each site visitor. Ad platforms in particular have sophisticated targeting capabilities which allow us to serve specific campaigns to people with certain interests or profile properties. If we segment visitors who clicked on a certain ad campaign and then landed on our website (via a campaign code), then we also absorb those known characteristics from the ad platform’s own targeting parameters. This allows us create more sophisticated personalization campaigns on our owned channels—instead of showing generic imagery about family travel to anyone who clicked a certain article, we can go a step further and show specific imagery of young families, families with teenagers, etc. to parents in certain age groups.

Amplify Your Investment

Using personalization, we can amplify our investment in email distributions and digital ads for visitors who click by altering the content that is then served on our website. Based on a visitor’s interests and characteristics, we can choose which content and CTAs to serve—putting our best foot forward with the material that most closely aligns with their wants and needs.

Don’t leave website visitors to their own devices. Help them find the most valuable information on your site by thinking beyond the click, and using data to create personalized experiences.

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With a background in PR and content marketing, Lucia has a knack for creating buzz. At Miles, she’s able to marry her two passions — travel and writing — to help our clients tell their stories in new and interesting ways. She’s traveled throughout the US, Sicily, Bali and beyond and is always planning the next adventure.